Turning back the tidehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/42.12/turning-back-the-tide
A volunteer naturalist describes the unique beauty -- and fragility -- of California's Elkhorn Slough Reserve.The afternoon tour that I'm leading at the Elkhorn Slough Reserve is not off to a promising start.

Although it's midsummer and we're standing at an overlook that usually offers panoramic views of California's second-largest salt marsh, a stubborn blanket of fog shrouds the Reserve. The eight visitors in my group pull their jackets tighter against a bone-chilling wind. No one looks very happy.

Even the slough's most conspicuous landmark, the twin 500-foot stacks of the Moss Landing Power Plant on the Monterey Bay, is sheathed in white. Thinking it's best to start moving, I lead the group down the trail. Along the way, I tell them how the 1,400-acre Reserve -- if they could only see it -- is one of the West's most significant birding areas as well as habitat for several rare plant communities and more than a dozen threatened or endangered species.

I point out some barely discernible low-lying islands surrounded by the slough's slate-gray water. It's the water -- and the tug of the tides -- that I most want to talk about today. That seemingly placid water poses a hidden threat to Elkhorn Slough.

Estuaries like Elkhorn are among the most productive natural systems on earth. But unless something is done to slow widespread tidal erosion caused by human alteration of the slough, within our lifetimes this rich marshland will disappear, joining the 90 percent of California's tidal wetlands that have already been dammed or diked or paved over.

In May 2003, I stood for the first time at the Elkhorn Slough overlook. It was twilight, and I was early for the initial meeting of a summer-long docent-training program. I had wandered out to the overlook to view the hundreds of acres of tidal marshes and mudflats that stretch to the horizon. From a distance, I could hear the cur-lee calls of a long-billed curlew.

Boyhood memories of ranger-led talks around evening campfires had left me with a long-held desire to become a volunteer naturalist. On a whim, I called the slough and asked about their docent program. By coincidence, the only docent training of the year was starting in five days. There was one space left. Would I like it?

So there I stood, breathing the salt air, when a powerful rumble came from the north end of the slough. A half-mile-long freight train appeared, chugging over the water across a series of levees. How strange, I thought. Why build a railroad track through a wetland?

From the overlook -- if you can ignore the train track and the towers of the Moss Landing Power Plant -- the slough appears natural. But for thousands of years humans have altered this estuary. During docent training we heard from historians who described how indigenous tribes fished the slough's waters and set fires to keep the grasslands open for hunting. When Europeans arrived, they stripped the oaks from the nearby hills and planted fields of wheat and barley. In 1872, the Southern Pacific Company built a main rail artery through the slough that is still in use today. As time passed, a complex system of dikes and levees spread across parts of the marsh, and some of it was converted to farmland.

After World War II, what is now California's largest power plant was built at the slough's entrance. Every time I come here, I am struck by the incongruity of this natural gas-fired behemoth at the entrance to a vital estuary. The Escher-like maze of the plant's pipes and towers are a monument to the days when wetlands like these were viewed as useless swampland that ought to be "reclaimed."

Then came the Army Corps of Engineers, who changed the slough profoundly. In 1946, they bulldozed a channel through the sand dunes at the slough's entrance to create Moss Landing Harbor. Breaching the dunes opened the slough's quiet brackish lagoons to the power of the tides. The new harbor mouth allowed "tidal scour" to begin to erode away the salt marsh that is crucial habitat for more than 200 bird, marine mammal and fish species. By 1979, when Elkhorn Slough became part of the National Estuarine Research Reserve system, the marshland was degrading at a rapid rate.

In seven years of leading tours at the slough, I've watched as the water's daily ebb and flow has deepened and widened the channels, causing the tidal currents to run faster. Tidal creeks that prior to the dredging of the harbor averaged eight feet in width have expanded to more than 40 feet and are wearing away vital roosting and nesting areas. The reclusive California clapper rail, which once lived in Elkhorn's marsh, has not been seen here in 30 years. A number of other threatened species are also imperiled by erosion, including the western snowy plover, Santa Cruz long-toed salamander, tidewater goby, California brackishwater snail, and California red-legged frog.

Currently, the equivalent of 10,500 truckloads of sediment sluices into the Monterey Bay eachyear. Half of the slough's tidal marsh has already been lost. If nothing is done, the rest of the marshland will be gone within 50 years.

----

I lead my group closer to the deceptively tranquil water, still hoping that the sun will burn through the cold fog. I turn to my main subject: the force of the water and the scour of the tides. Through the mist, we can see a stretch of mudflats and marsh.

"It hasn't always looked like this," I say, and pass around a black-and-white photograph taken 70 years ago on the very spot where we stand. The change is startling. Where willets and marbled godwits now thrust their bills into the mud searching for invertebrates, the picture shows cattle grazing on a broad expanse of pastureland.

"In the early '80s, this area became part of the Reserve. The levees were breached, and the land returned to a more natural state." I point to a low railroad bridge that allows the only tidal flow to this 460-acre portion of the slough. After years of study, it is here that a first attempt will be made to turn back the tide.

Bryan Largay has been working to make this happen. Largay directs the Tidal Wetland Project, which seeks to conserve and restore estuarine habitats at the slough. He described to me plans to build a giant, horseshoe-shaped underwater sill of steel pilings at the railroad bridge. Largay's team hopes that the $2 million construction project, which is funded by federal stimulus money and scheduled to begin in the fall, will decrease the volume of water entering this part of the slough. He says that slowing the tidal flow here should also help to alleviate some of the scouring elsewhere.

Despite sophisticated modeling projections, predicting changes in the slough's complicated hydrology is like one of those math problems with so many parts that it makes your head hurt. The underwater sill is the first cautious step in trying to slow the erosive tides. What is learned from this project will help guide future restoration plans.

By the end of the afternoon, I'm once again standing with the tour group at the overlook. The sun has finally dissolved the fog and filled the air with warmth. As the slough's stillness seeps into us, the group finds an easy camaraderie. No one is in a hurry to leave.

They gather around me, and I tell them a final story: "Those of us who work at the slough sometimes jokingly call it the ‘cosmic center of the universe.' " I smile, then gesture toward the mosaic of deep-green oaks and amber grasslands rolling down to a nearby marsh where a great flock of sandpipers wheel and flash in the sun. "I guess the cosmic center could be anywhere you want it to be. But if you had to pick a place..."

After the group wanders back to the visitors' center, I linger at the overlook. A pale crescent moon softens the sky, and the tide follows the silent lunar traction. Another mud bank crumbles, another truckload of marsh slips into the sea.

Despite all the human alterations to the slough, I know there's an even darker, shadowy history of what might have been. During the 1960s and '70s, bitter battles were fought to stop developers from lining the slough's shores with condominiums and boat docks and from constructing a major oil refinery and a nuclear power plant.

I've come to believe that preserving and restoring the slough's former private pastureland as a public nature preserve represents more than a physical transformation. It embodies the radical idea promoted a century ago by John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt's chief forester, to set aside great tracts of land as reserves and refuges for the public and for the wildlife that live there. It's what New York Times environmental writer Timothy Egan describes as "the West of possibility versus the West of possession."

I look across the braided channels of water and marvel that it's been seven years since I first stood here. The tides rise, the tides fall, the years pass. When I am an old man, I want to be able to return to this overlook, to bring my grandchildren here to breathe the air fragrant with salt and sage and to have them hear the curlew's call.

John Moir is an award-winning author and journalist who lives in Santa Cruz, California; see www.jmoir.com

]]>No publisherCommunitiesEssays2010/07/16 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticleSeeking a vocation in no-man's landhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/41.18/seeking-a-vocation-in-no-mans-land
Salam Talib, who barely escaped from Iraq with his life, now seeks a new beginning in San Francisco.See end of story for a complete package of refugee stories in this issue.

The threatening phone calls worried Salam Talib.

In 2005, the then-29-year-old Iraqi was working as a translator and journalist in Baghdad. Amid the chaos of Iraq, it wasn't even clear who had targeted him.

"I was a Shiite living in a mixed neighborhood where the Shiia and Sunnis were taking revenge on each other a lot," Talib says. "The people threatening to kill me were probably from a Sunni group, although it's possible it was Shiias who thought I was a traitor."

Two days after the threats began, a friend borrowed Talib's sedan. He had driven less than a block down a busy Baghdad street when three gunmen ambushed the car, killing him. Knowing that the assassins would almost certainly strike again, Talib booked the first available flight to Jordan, leaving behind his family, language, culture, career, friends, possessions and dreams.

Talib grew up in a small house in Babylon where he and his 10 siblings shared two rooms. As an infant, he contracted polio, which left him paralyzed in both legs. Wheelchairs and crutches became his primary means of moving around.

Despite the crowded living conditions, one room in the house was filled with books. Those books were Talib's salvation. While the other kids played in the neighborhood's dirt streets, Talib read. And he remembered everything.

"Even though education is very important in Iraqi culture, if you are disabled, you traditionally don't go to school," he says. But Talib's mother, realizing that he had a photographic memory, insisted that he receive an education. In 1996, Talib earned an engineering degree from the University of Baghdad.

Then, seven years later, the war swept his life away. Like thousands of Iraqis, Talib lost his job and sought work with the Americans. Because he spoke English, he was hired as a translator. He ended up working with Pacifica Radio and even filed some of his own news reports. Then came the attempt on his life.

"In Jordan, I had no rights whatsoever," Talib says. As he worked on immigrating to another country, his life fell into a new pattern: He found himself waiting. After four months, Talib obtained a visitor's visa to the U.S. Because he had a friend already living there, he came to San Francisco.

In the U.S., he faced a confusing and often illogical bureaucracy. "My lawyer told me that it was very hard to prove to the U.S. authorities that the Iraq situation was bad enough to qualify for refugee status," he says. "They didn't understand how serious it was." When his six-month visitor's visa expired in 2006, he applied for a student visa, and enrolled in a computer science graduate program at San Francisco State University.

In 2008, Talib applied for refugee status. "I wasn't really here to study, I was here to escape the situation in Iraq," he says. Although 2 million Iraqis have fled their country since the war began, the U.S. has admitted very few refugees -- in 2006, for example, the U.S. accepted only 202 Iraqis. But Talib's waiting paid off: In 2008, the number rose to 13,823, and he finally qualified as a refugee able to legally remain permanently in the U.S.

Nowadays, Talib lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Berkeley. His tiny living room contains no tables so he can maneuver his wheelchair more easily. There are a few mementos to remind him of home: a ceramic Arabic drum, an Iraqi tapestry.

The Bay Area community is supportive of the disabled, Talib says, and people share his views on the war, the environment and human rights. He plans to stay, although at times he feels as if he lives in a no-man's-land between two cultures.

"I feel like I'm half Iraqi, half American," he said.

Talib knows of only 17 Iraqi refugees living in the Bay Area, all young men in their 20s. Most speak little English, and they often turn to Talib for advice.

"On the weekends, we want to go out," Talib said. "But we don't go to clubs because we don't drink. There are no Iraqi restaurants. We don't know what to do. Sometimes we get in the car, we drive around for a couple of hours, and we go back home."

Currently he is working with another journalist to raise funds for a documentary on the trafficking of Iraqi women refugees for the sex trade in Jordan and Syria.

He is still looking for a permanent job. Talib would love to use his computer skills to help Iraqis, especially those disabled by the war. "Millions of dollars are spent to protect people in Iraq while they are waiting in lines to fill out paperwork. One solution to Iraq's expensive security situation is to put forms online so people can do the paperwork safely at home."

Talib wants to be the main designer of this project, so he continues to look for a sponsor to support it. And, as he has done so often in this strange new life, he waits. And waits some more.

More than English The Emily Griffith School has taught English to immigrants and refugees since its Language Learning Center opened in 1981. Using creativity, games and encouragement, the school also offers an orientation to U.S. culture and workplace protocol.

“I like America” Multimedia: A unique neighborhood north of Seattle is home to about a dozen different ethnic groups, most of them refugees. The neighborhood center is used on Sunday mornings for Russian church, on Fridays for Arabic Muslim services, on weeknights for ESL classes for Somali Bantu.

]]>No publisher2009/10/26 02:00:00 GMT-6ArticleTimothy Egan's Western odyssey http://www.hcn.org/issues/41.16/timothy-egans-western-odyssey
New York Times correspondent and National Book Award winner Timothy Egan talks about his enduring love for the West. When he was a young man, Timothy Egan discovered two things: He loved to write -- and he was enthralled with the Western landscape. Egan combined these two passions into a journalism career that has spanned nearly three decades. After getting his start at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, he went on to spend 18 years reporting on the West for the New York Times. In 2001, he shared a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of New York Times reporters covering race in America.

Egan is the author of five books about the West. In 2006, he won the National Book Award for nonfiction for The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl.

High Country News correspondent John Moir spoke with Egan about his writing and the West. This interview has been condensed and edited for readability.

HIGH COUNTRY NEWS The dedication in your book The Good Rain: Across Time and Terrain in the Pacific Northwest reads: "To my mother who always said, Stay West, and then showed me why." What was it that your mother showed you?

TIMOTHY EGAN My mother loved the outdoors. When I was a kid, we'd go on walks where she would sing the praises of nature. She'd say: "Look at this mountain lake, look at this great view." She was the best proselytizer for the Northwest. Although she wanted me to travel and to see the world, she said, "You're going to go all over, but you'll see there is no better place than here."

HCN How did you turn your early love of writing into a journalism career?

EGAN I always worked at the high school paper and the college paper. I liked mixing it up with journalism; I liked being part of the public policy debate. I got my journalistic break with the worst oil spill in American history -- the grounding of the Exxon Valdez. I was then stringing for the New York Times when they asked me to rush to Alaska. I was there 10 days or so, writing for page one every day, staying in a fisherman's spare bedroom. In the midst of this flurry, I asked for a raise. They said they would do me one better and hired me.

HCN How do you approach writing about the West?

EGAN Writing for the New York Times forced me to look at this region through an outsider's eyes. I had always taken everything for granted, as most of us do. It made me pull back and ask: What interests the rest of the world? And then I realized that, my God, there are all these wonderful stories here.

HCN In telling these stories, you have written that in the West "the basic struggle is between the West of possibility and the West of possession." What are the origins of this conflict?

EGAN This battle goes back to Teddy Roosevelt and before: Who is going to own Western land? Roosevelt's idea -- and his cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, had the same idea -- was that the land belongs to the people. It defines us as Westerners to have all this public land. In opposition to this is the Western individualism myth where you let people get their piece and do what they will with it. If you look at Western history, you'll see this theme (of possibility versus possession) going through most of our stories.

HCN How do you see this dynamic playing out nowadays?

EGAN I think the battle for public sentiment on the value of national forests, national parks, clean water and wilderness -- areas that are largely left alone and unmuddled -- that battle has largely been won in favor of people who want to preserve open space and scenery. But here's the wild card: We are in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression, and a lot of things get thrown out the window. In the past, when pollsters asked, "Are you in favor of preserving the environment even if it comes at the risk of the economy?" that question was always answered by a majority putting environmental concerns over the economy. Now, for the first time since they've started asking this question, the economy has come out ahead.

HCN The theme of environmental calamity runs through many of your books. Do you see parallels between a story such as The Worst Hard Time and what is happening now in the West?

EGAN I was drawn to the Dust Bowl story because it was a perfect fable of the earth. It was an exact example of what happens when you push nature and nature pushes back. As long as the grass was there, it didn't matter how much the wind was blowing or how many droughts they had. But, in literally 10 years' time, farmers overturned a huge amount of ground. In the story, I quote a Native American looking out at the desolation; he turns to his son and points to where the grass was overturned and says, "Wrong side up." And that's the story of the Dust Bowl in its essence: wrong side up. There's a parable quality to it that I was really attracted to. It's funny, I didn't see it as a global warming precursor, but people who read the book, mostly young people, started to talk to me about that.

HCN Water is another all-important Western resource that pits powerful interests against one another. You -- and many others -- have said that "water flows uphill toward money."

EGAN It's true. You can't write about this land and not write about water being the destiny changer that it is. About 10 years ago, I was interviewing some Enron executives before that company went bankrupt. They were starting to buy up private water supplies. This is when they were at the height of their hubris and controlling the energy world and had all of these politicians in their pockets. They were actually buying some municipal water supplies and saying, "We'll privatize it." I remember interviewing this Enron exec and saying, "Water? What are you guys doing in water?" And he said to me, "Water is going to be to the 21st century what oil was to the last century."

HCN The West is not the only place to face conflicts over land and water usage. In 1997, you and your family spent most of a year living in Italy. What did your time in Italy teach you about the West?

EGAN We lived not far from the Apennine Mountains, and you could see pieces of land that were largely unchanged, where sheepherder families had been running sheep for a thousand years. What I learned in Italy is that here's a country much older than ours with a much (denser) population and a much more chaotic political situation. But they understand the countryside has usefulness to them. For the most part, Italians have made peace with their land. If you live in the city, you go for your passeggiata, which is your walk, on Sunday in the country. You get your food from the country. The Italians understand that they have a relationship to the land outside of the city. It's a practical relationship, one born of utilitarianism. I'm not saying Italians are perfect, but they've figured out a compact with their land. So seeing that made me realize that the population is not the problem in the West.

HCN Could you give us a preview of your new book, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, which will be published in October?

EGAN It's the story of the largest forest fire in American history. The fire itself was extraordinary. It created hurricane-force winds, and it burned 3 million acres in 36 hours. But what drew me to the story was the drama of the fire set against a larger story of conservation.

I never realized how much our public-lands legacy was threatened early on. My thesis is that this huge fire essentially saved public lands by making heroes of Roosevelt's young Forest Service. It was a radical idea, promoted by Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, to set aside more than 200 million acres of public land -- but it was opposed by Gilded Age forces and many Western politicians. After Roosevelt left office in 1909, support dwindled. Then came the fire, making martyrs and heroes of the 100 or so people who died in a blaze that burned an area the size of Connecticut. But, ironically, the Forest Service then took away the wrong lesson -- to try and snuff all wildfires, a tragic course, which led to much buildup in fuel and catastrophic burns, and a firefighting-industrial complex such as we have today that spends billions of dollars. So this fire is very much with us a century later -- in good ways and bad.

HCN You are a prolific writer, and The Big Burn is just the latest in your growing body of work on the West. How do you keep the words flowing?

EGAN I come from a blue-collar background. I've worked on a farm, bucking hay bales. I've worked at an aluminum factory. So when I finally started to make it as a writer, I didn't sit around and wait for the muse to strike. During my years working as a national correspondent for the New York Times, I traveled nearly 50,000 miles a year -- all over the West. My constant companion was Norman Maclean's book, A River Runs Through It. If I was on deadline and stuck, I'd just open it up and read a couple paragraphs. Things flowed easily from there.